Title: Walmart: Diary of an Associate

Author: Hugo Meunir

Publisher: Fernwood Publishing

Pages: 184

Rating: 5/5

Walmart

Walmart

Walmart

What can I say about this gigantic, soul snatching, awful place? Journalist Hugo Meunière went undercover as a employee for Walmart for 3 months in St. Leonard in Canada. Within these 3 months Hugo gives us an inside look of the tragedy that is working at Walmart. The constant talks about numbers in the morning meetings, the disrespectful customers who treated the employees like crap, the constant fear of retaliation if someone said something they were unhappy with. I can attest to these claims. I myself worked at Walmart for four years and it was the worst four years of my life. I started off as a back room associate and decided to go for an opened position of department manager for the men’s department and boy did they give me grief for that. They really made me feel like I couldn’t do it; they doubted me before I could even get a chance to prove myself. I finally got the position and they basically threw me into two departments without any training, didn’t explain anything to me. I had to rely on one of my co-workers who was a department manager to help me understand our normal 9am paper work that was printed for us. Everyday I would come in to see my department tossed around with everything plugged from the overnight associates not doing their jobs. I myself have had the displeasure of working months and months overnight to help prepare for the super center to open for our store and it was exhausting. Honestly, working with a company that’s a bunch of leeches that wouldn’t care about you if you dropped dead. Such was the case one Black Friday. If you’ve heard about Black Fridays tragedies, I’m sure you’ve heard of the one where an employee got trampled on and died because of it….yep…that was my store. And that was a couple years before I started working there, to that day they still hadn’t settled anything with the victims family. This is only the tip of the iceberg here. There was also a girl who committed suicide that worked there because she couldn’t take the pressure of her life and work. A cashier once had an epileptic attack and they didn’t call an ambulance until half hour later….one other example is a girl that was 8 months pregnant and they wanted her to stand her whole shift to answer phones. A few co-workers and myself went off on management because of this. Overall, I enjoyed this book because in reality he’s not lying about what he wrote, and there’s a lot of people out there that are skeptic of what people say about Walmart…if it’s true…and I’m here to say…yes…it’s true.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review of the book.